Why am I still buying protected e-books--after the B&N lost its faith in e-books? Let me tell you why:

1. Palm Format has the best reasonable protection for ebook. Even though there is no crack available, I will not be worried that the store closed its shop. The Palm e-book will never--knock on wood--become obsolete.

2. MS Reader is easily crackable. All the e-books that I purchased, I took off the protections with Convert Lit 1.4, so I will not be worried in the future if the store that I purchased the e-books from is like the Barnes UnNoble Store.

3. Then using my free 30-megabyte Yahoo Briefcase, I upload all my favorite cracked MS e-books and Palm e-books there, so I will always have the e-books backup available online. If you run out of the space, open a new Yahoo! account.

"Remember, just do not pass the cracked e-books. Use them responsibly for your right as an honest buyer."

-Pocket PC eBooks Watch-
posted by Jerry Justianto at 11:27 PM | permanent link

Want specifics on how DRM zealots could threat our library system? Jenny Levine has 'em from a librarian's perspective. Good job!

I myself am especially offended by some libraries' application of DRM to public domain classics, which patrons should be able to keep and spread as much as they want. Copyrighted material such as introductions should be decoupled if need be from the main text. Or "pure" public domain editions should be around to augment those with contemorary material still under copyright.

In fairness to DRM-crippled libraries, this has been happening in part with the encouragement of companies such as Adobe.

Meanwhile, to learn of a refreshing contrast to the control-minded approach of so many book publishers, see Larry Lessig's new Financial Times article--The BBC's Lesson for America.

posted by David Rothman at 7:02 AM | permanent link

Ease of updating is one of the big arguments for e-textbooks. Three articles in the Washington Post nicely illustrate the problems that can result when the use of paper forces a stop-the-presses mentality on history book publishers.

Read Sept. 11 is Already in the History Books, Textbook Versions Prompt Concerns and Finding Words to Explain a Tragic Time. If anything, Post reporter S. Mitra Kalita, may be too hard on publishers. But her point comes through well. Textbook quality can suffer when publishers try to rush out history books to meet print deadlines. E-books to the rescue!

A TeleRead-style approach would offer an additional advantage--fixed, reliable links. Publishers could more easily link to reflective articles by historians and journalists, as well as source material such as government documents.
posted by David Rothman at 4:26 AM | permanent link

Flying fish, eight-ton squids on land, snails that hop kangaroo style, and 21st-century mammals ending up as extinct as T-Rexes and Brontosaurs--that's how a television show depicted the earth's future.

So what's ahead for the e-book business, which was hit this week by at least a small comet when Barnes and Noble pulled out? Will today's big players suffer the past fate of the dinosaurs and the future fate of the program's mammals? Networker, one of the regulars on the eBook Community list, offered some interesting speculation, which, in slightly tweaked form, appears with his permission below.

At the end of Networker's observations, written in response to another list member's belief that B&N's form of Digital Rights Management might have hurt the company, I'll offer my thoughts on what a TeleRead model could mean to the surviving e-bookstores. The smarter stores could benefit through adaptations of public collections--used as hooks to point buyers to works available through purchase or subscription.

* * *

Now I have nothing but the utmost disdain for Digital Rights Management systems and the publishers who deploy it. I believe that DRM hurts everyone in the e-book production chain from the author to the consumer; the only ones benefiting from DRM in
e-books are the companies which provide the enabling technologies--for example, Content Reserve and Micro$oft Corp.

However, I don't believe that the failure of B&N's e-book sales can be laid at the feet of DRM, but rather at the failure of B&N's business model.

Over a year ago I read a book by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen called The Innovator's Dilemna: Why Companies Fail by Doing Everything Right. Through the use of a half-dozen case studies Mr. Christensen suggests that in business there will occasionally arise what he calls "disruptive technologies."

The choice of the word "distruptive" is rather unfortunate, as these technologies are not disruptive to society nor are they necessarily innovative. What they mostly are are different, and cater to market segment which a business has not traditionally served. The new market segment grows primarily when another business' traditional customer base begins to migrate to the companies offering the new technology.

One of the interesting things about disruptive technologies is that large companies are frequently incapable of dealing with them, even when they understand perfectly what is happening and the probable consequences! The company I presently work for is probably a good example of this. I imagine it must be like hearing a torpedo in the water, knowing you are going to be hit, and being unable to do anything about it.

But what about e-books? Well, they are clearly a disruptive technology, as defined by Professor Christensen.

For myself, I view an e-book in the same category as a mass-market paperpack, having about the same life-cycle. While it is possible for perfect copies of an e-book uncrippled by DRM to circulate indefinitely, I don't think it actually happens. I suspect that an open-format, unencumbered e-book acquired through legitimate channels will, on average, not be shared any more frequently than a paperback book. And, like every other consumer, I know that the cost of production of an e-book is less than that of a paper book, and is much more amenable to economies of scale. As a consumer, I will not pay more for an e-book than I would for a paperback book, and I would expect to pay less. If I cannot share an e-book with my sons, like I do with all of my paperbacks, I would expect to pay far less.

A quick check at Amazon.com shows that Michael Crichton's Prey currently sells for $7.99 in mass-market paperback, $18.87 in hardcover, and $19.95 in Micro$oft crippled format. This is insane.

I believe it was Bill Gates, in Business @ the Speed of Thought, who said that people tend to over-estimate the amount of progress that will occur in three years, and under-estimate the amount that will occur in ten. I still believe that e-books will eventually become the majority format for those works which currently occupy the pulp-fiction category. I don't believe that this will occur within the next three years, but it might within the next ten.

So, we have an overpriced product, being sold by a company which doesn't understand how to reconcile the new market segment with its traditional customer base, managed by MBA's who are so short-sighted that they think if you're not successful in 10 months you should get out of the business. It's not shocking that Barnes & Noble (or Gemstar/TV Guide) is abandoning the e-book market; indeed, it was inevitable.

I predict that over the next three years most, if not all, of the "majors" will have abandoned e-books, and in ten years, when e-books are a mainstream product, the major players will be those small companies that only the people on this list are familiar with today. By that time some of today's big resellers will make an attempt to get back into the business, but it will be too late for them to recapture anything but a small segment of the total market.

* * *

The TeleRead take: Some and perhaps many of today's players could indeed repeat B&N's mistake and exit the business prematurely. Just how willing will they be to cannibalize their existing products? A lady from Palm Digital Media spoke volumes about the mindset of the majors, either wittingly or unwittingly, when she was discussing the high price of many e-books. She noted that prices in many cases will come down after the appearance of mass-market paperbacks. But what if e-book publishers can develop good, popular writers on their own and disrupt the present marketing cycles? Then it's bye-bye mammals? The irony is that in the future, at least physically, e-books may well end up much like p-books--with paper-sharp "printing" and flippable pages. But by then, a number of mammals may be gone and the skies filled with flying fish.

Of course, some of the more deft of the giants may just go the flying fish route--for example, Amazon, a master of innovation and, as Virginia Postel shows in the New York Times, of customer retention. "Both sites lose customers when prices rise, but Barnes & Noble loses a lot more," she wrote of an academic study by economist Austan Goolsbee at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

If anything, e-books could be better for Amazon than p-books since it could strive to weave its offerings more tightly into the fabric of the Net. I can even see a place for Amazon if the library model prevails since, at least with a TeleRead approach, companies might be free to take a pubic database and present it however they wanted--with minimal restrictions. Amazon's own collection could include a mix of free and comercial books, and many or all of the latter would be available via subscription. Similarly some of the more adept of Amazon smaller competitors could fare very well, since they could instantly scale up through inclusion of the public database, directly or through linking. As with Amazon, descrpiptions of Book A (let's say a TeleRead book) could come with points to Book B (offered through via purchase or subscription).

In the case of free books paid for via a national digital library fund, authors would receive the same compensations as if readers had accessed the books directly through TeleRead. The commercial bookstores would simply be using the freebies as traffic generators and blending them in with their own products.

What I don't want to see is the e-book business revolving around just one company, Amazon or anyone else. TeleRead would provide an attractive alternative. - David Rothman
posted by David Rothman at 6:57 AM | permanent link

Linking is the norm on the Web, but e-books tend to be islands--without stable, reliable links that a TeleRead-style approach could bring about. But what about the legal liabilities of, say, linking to material that someone might deem to be a copyright violation? Whew. A Dutch court has made a pro-Net, pro-e-book decision--discussed on Slashdot and in a CNET article.

Unrelated: Not all's happy news on the copyright front. The RIAA has just filed 261 lawsuits as part of its war against its customers. Then again, maybe this is good in one sense. The more harshly the RIAA treats the public, the greater the outcry--and the better the chances of a system allowing for legal file-sharing with appropriate compensation for content-providers.
posted by David Rothman at 10:30 AM | permanent link

Where's Ambrose Bierce when we need him? I propose that he return from the dead to do a Devil's Dictionary with e-book users and their software nemeses especially in mind. Perhaps he could go beyond stinging definitions of existing words and invent the right terms for us. Here are some possible candidates.

--Chairware, suggesting "execute" in the electric chair sense. Actually I mean the .exe formats--the "execute" ones--for e-books. You wouldn't want to run executables in strange e-mails? So why trust a publisher, even a well-known house, not to give you an e-book file that could do just about any gruesome thing it wanted with the shockable innards of your system? Yes, on the Web, some sites force us to be at their mercy to a great extent. But why add to the problem? Luckily the major publishers don't seem as keen on executables as certain small fry. Pun intended.

--Fenceware. This e-book-reading software, not to be confused with software for designing the keep-the-dog-in kind of fence, works only with blessed formats, restricting your choices of reading matter. A great example is Microsoft Reader. Try getting it to read unconverted ASCII. The negatives of Fenceware go on and on. The more your choices are restricted, the easier it is for publishers to gouge you. But in the end, they'll lose out, too, since the total universe of e-book users will be smaller than it should be. Obnoxious and expensive Digital Rights Management schemes, the fault of either the software vendors or greedy content-providers, often accompany Fenceware. So does overcharging of libraries. Jenny Levine just within the past few days served up two Adobe-related examples, respectively involving her library system and an LA Times reader, who, it turns out, couldn't even print a list of gubernatorial candidates in California--until he used pdf2ps and ps2pdf to bypass the "protection." Needless to say, a universal consumer format for e-books could help immensely, as could either avoidance of DRM or at least more sensible use.

--Stogware. In this case, you just want to enjoy an e-book, DVD or other content, and you're forced to install a new program that in a stealthy way adds to the bloat on your hard disk and taxes other resources. The big bloat issue is more of a DVD than e-book problem right now if you exclude the general proliferation of e-book formats, some of which may not need an e-book reader that big. But stay tuned as e-books become more multimedia in nature.

--Tentacleware, as my friend Jon Noring calls it--a close cousin of stogware, but meaner. A tentacleware victim installs a new program on his or her system, and then it reaches everywhere like a killer octopus in the Verne vein, clashing with other software in ways beyond a more strain on resources. I don't have examples immediately from the e-book world, but you can bet they'll be on the way--when software vendors extend DRM capabilities to cover potentially everything, not just the usual protected commercial content. And it'll very possibly be all or nothing if you want to be able to read the protected titles. One good example of the potential risk came when my McAfee VirusScan program apparently picked a fight with a recent Microsoft update of Win XP. The result? My hard disk filled up with gig after gig of crap, as if a real-life virus were attacking me and spraying virtual ink to prevent me from knowing what was going on. The villainous temporary file was tucked away in a subdirectory of Documents and Settings. Thanks, Kim Komando, for the McAfee info.

Got your own term to add to this mini-dictionary? E-mail dr@teleread.org.

Kind of related: Speaking of threats to your system, you might consider switching to The Bat!--e-mail software that by default excels at ignoring the most popular formats of evil attached files. Editing and reading capabilities in HTML need improvement, but on the whole this e-mail client is a gem for power users interested in safe computing. The importation feature, as used with Eudora's e-mail boxes, worked just great except for the apparent lack of ability to pick up the old filters for sorting messages into appropriate boxes. Thanks to Jon Noring for pointing me to The Bat! and, separately, the Komando tip on McAfee.
posted by David Rothman at 2:07 AM | permanent link